MUSIC

MUSIC; Elliott Smith's Uneasy Afterlife

By R J SMITH

Published: July 18, 2004

Correction Appended

LOS ANGELES—
IN a recording studio last month, Rob Schnapf, a bearded, baseball-capped producer, and Joanna Bolme, a black-haired indie rock bassist, were sitting around listening to the latest Elliott Smith song, called ''Let's Get Lost.'' The voice pouring out of the speakers sounded familiar, conversational. It was the voice of a friend. Snapshots taped up around the room showed Smith in a lighthearted mood: making a silly face in one, eyes closed in another.

As Mr. Schnapf, who worked with Smith in the 90's, and Ms. Bolme, who dated him for a while, know, Smith had a goofball sense of humor and a well of curiosity.

To his fans, however, he was better known for his sorrows. His reputation was built through songs about drug addiction, love and his uneasy connections to listeners fumbling with uneasy connections in their own lives. But it was cemented last Oct. 21, when Elliott Smith died of knife wounds to his chest, in his apartment in the Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles. He was 34.

In addition to a passionately devoted army of the shy, and a girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, Smith left behind dozens of songs recorded in the last four years of his life and meant for a double CD titled ''From a Basement on the Hill.'' Over the last few months, Mr. Schnapf and Ms. Bolme have sifted through some 45 hours of that music. Working together with Smith's family, they are mixing and mastering the material for release on Oct. 19.

That's just the latest tribute, commercial or otherwise, that has been undertaken since his death. Memorial concerts have been staged from Athens, Ohio, to Leeds, England. The indie rockers Sparta have recorded ''Bombs and Us,'' a song about Smith. A New York-based journalist named Benjamin Nugent is writing ''Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing,'' a biography slated for fall release. The classical pianist Christopher Riley, fresh from gussying up the music of Radiohead, is recording a CD of Smith's compositions. And some 10,000 fans have signed a petition to the Los Angeles City Council to turn a strip of public land into hallowed ground, à la Strawberry Fields in New York's Central Park. At the other end of the spectrum, some opportunistic vendors responded quickly to the news of Smith's death by spamming fans with ads for commemorative T-shirts.

Some of these posthumous offerings have been loving, others crass. But one way or another, Elliott Smith will sell a lot of merchandise this year.

USUALLY, when new music is tested out on studio speakers, the moment is pregnant with excitement. But listening to ''From a Basement on the Hill,'' it just felt like a wake with great tunes.

''It'd be a lot easier if he'd be around to help us,'' Ms. Bolme said.

Mr. Schnapf added, ''I was kind of hoping he'd show up.''

As Smith sang, however, the sadness that flooded his five CD's swamped the room. ''I'm burning every bridge I ever crossed,'' he sang, ''to find some beautiful place to get lost.'' By the last line, two opposing things are true: Smith is dead, and Smith is here.

In the months since his death, a sadly familiar thing has happened, too. Smith has gotten the Baudelaire treatment, achieved a heightened status as a fallen martyr, the kind too sensitive to live. Perhaps that's inevitable, given the unusual role he occupied in the lives of his fans: His gentle, smart songs connected with people who felt shoved to the margins of their lives; now they are left to figure out how songs that made them feel saved did not save the man who sang them.

All of this posthumous scrutiny is something Smith would have loathed, as much as he loathed the starmaking juggernaut. Alive he fled the spotlight; now where's he going to run?

Loath to violate their friend's wishes, and aware of the intensity of this music and the meaning it has for Smith's fans, those working on ''From a Basement on the Hill'' seem a little spooked by the responsibility they've taken on.

Lucrative trickles of outtakes and rejected songs have followed the deaths of artists like Tupac Shakur, who seems more prolific now than when he was alive, and Nick Drake, whose archivists just discovered a ''lost'' song that should probably have stayed that way. But Mr. Schnapf and Ms. Bolme say that ''From a Basement on the Hill'' is the end of the road.

''We want this to be the last living body of work,'' Mr. Schnapf says adamantly. ''This is his last record.''

It won't ultimately be Mr. Schnapf's decision, however. Smith's family has a lot more unreleased material, and they have made no such guarantees about their intentions.

Smith was underrated as a musician, but ''Let's Get Lost,'' which will be the second track on the new CD, takes wing on his deft guitar picking. His debt to ''Blackbird,'' the singer-songwriter John Hartford (''Gentle on My Mind'') and Piedmont blues are all in place, as disarmingly friendly playing gives way to dark thoughts. There is a kind of California pop, the most famous kind, that is rich with ebullient harmonies and billboarded emotions. At the time of his death, Smith was exploring a sound he jokingly called ''the California Frown,'' an inverse of Beach Boy optimism. Gloomy and intimate, the songs are Smith at his best, though there's also a strong hint of the confusion and instability that haunted his final days.

Correction: August 1, 2004, Sunday An article on July 18 about posthumous releases of the music of Elliott Smith misspelled the surname of a pianist who is recording a CD of Smith's compositions. He is Christopher O'Riley, not Riley.